Here too is where we meet Jackie Frazier,
the owner of Barefoot Farms, manning tables
laden with candy-sweet strawberries and plump
tomatoes under a hand-painted sign. Three
years in a row, his entire crop got wiped out by
hurricanes, yet here he remains, bare toes sink-
ing into the soft dirt just like his father’s before
him and his grandfather’s before that. We wend
our way through rows of melons and collard
greens to a converted trailer out back lined
with 1,500 quails cooing quietly in their cages.
“You still on that quail egg diet?” Dennis asks.
“Sure am.” Three raw eggs every morning
and night, Frazier says, will cure whatever ails
you: diabetes, hypertension, arthritis. But they
won’t make your children—his are all grown—
take over the family business. “It will end with
me,” he says. “Nobody wants to farm anymore.
You can make a living a whole lot easier doing
something else.”
Of course, Dennis points out, kids not wanting
to take up their parents’ professions isn’t a prob-
lem unique to the Gullah Geechee. But the cul-
ture’s centuries-old refusal to assimilate is what’s
kept it strong. That’s why educating Gullah
youth about their roots and reinstating a sense
of pride in their identity is so crucial. Failing
that, Gullah culture could disappear.
That’s also why people like Bill Green are so
inspiring to Dennis. We meet Green over plates
of fried shark and red rice at his restaurant,
Gullah Grub, in a white clapboard house. A
farmer, fisherman, and huntsman, Green used
to have his own cooking show on the local public
access channel. “When I was a kid we’d watch
him actin’ stupid, cooking dishes we eat,”
Dennis recalls. “He was a living legend for us.
Unapologetic Geechee.” Today Gullah Grub is
not only a restaurant but a training center where
Green and his wife, Sara, show local middle
schoolers how to cook a simple pot of rice, how
to fish, how to grow vegetables. “You’ve got to
teach it,” Green says, “because when you leave,
you ain’t carrying nothing with you.”
Now 72, Green sees Dennis as a protégé of
sorts, and the younger chef gives the love right
back: “For Bill to say he’s proud of what I’m
doing is bigger than any James Beard Award.
This is my award. Sitting here with him.”
AS OUR ROAD TRIP UNFOLDS, there are
patterns I start to notice. Some are distressing,
like how the region’s growing influx of tourists,
and the property taxes that have ballooned in
their wake, are pushing the Gullah off their
land. On St. Simons Island in Georgia, once
home to a robust community of emancipated
African Americans, the black population is
down to less than 3 percent, with more than a
quarter of the housing units occupied only sea-
sonally. Gullah landmarks—like Igbo Landing,
where tribespeople captured from modern-day
Nigeria overtook their slave ship, then walked
together into the murky waters of Dunbar Creek to avoid
the fate they knew was in store—are privately owned and
bear no official historical marker. We drive past a cemetery
for the enslaved that’s now owned by a golf course.
But I also notice encouraging things, like how nearly
every Gullah home we visit has a vegetable garden instead
of the typical suburban lawn. And how each visit, Dennis
slips back to the car and returns with a canvas bag full of
seeds to share. He knows by sight what each unlabeled
ziplock and glass vial contains: Sapelo Island okra; Sea
Island red peas; orca beans, so named because they look
like tiny killer whales. This one came from a farmer in
Benin; that one grows well in partial sun.
Today this kind of heirloom produce has become rare,
expensive, often relegated to the world of upscale restau-
rants—an irony Michael Twitty wrote about on his blog,
Afroculinaria: “Our story has been used to raise the price
point of many menus so much so that the descendants of
the enslaved cannot afford to enjoy and appreciate the
very edible heritage that was nourished by their Ances-
tors’ skills, knowledge, and blood.”
That’s why community seed sharing is so important,
Twitty tells me: “It’s about restoration.” By passing down
the same sustenance his ancestors carried with them on
the slave ships from Africa, Dennis is able to not only
anchor a people to their past, but bring back the kind of
self-sufficiency that’s always existed in this community.
It’s a small and simple act, but it’s also a revolution.EEDS IN TOW, we make our way to Savannah
to meet Gina Capers-Willis, who runs the cater-
ing company What’s Gina Cooking. When we
arrive, her mother, Ella, is seated at the kitchen
table, critiquing her daughter’s dishes and regaling us
with tales: how she learned to make moonshine at 13, how
she found a cheatin’ way to catch crabs in a bucket down
on the creek. Dennis sits and listens while I join Capers-
Willis at the stove, watching her stir a big pat of butter into
creamy grits and then spoon smothered garlic crab on top.
Ella approves, giggling at my clumsy attempts to extract
the sweet crabmeat as she chomps right through a claw
with her 86-year-old teeth.
Our next stop is the chef Roosevelt Brownlee’s Savannah
bachelor pad. When we arrive for dinner, he’s wearing a
knit rastacap and a red apron over an African-print shirt,
white beard tied in a knot below his chin. Back in the ’60s
and ’70s, Brownlee cooked for all the American jazz greats
touring Europe —“Muddy Waters used to take his dentures
out to eat my chicken!”—but came home to Savannah and
got overlooked for basic kitchen jobs.
“I guess they called me the rebellious one because
everywhere I went I’d wear something representing Africa,”
he says, sliding four of his famous Daufuskie deviled crabs
into the oven, thorny shells filled with fluffy pillows of
spiced crabmeat. Watching Dennis’s rise is the kind of tri-
umph that feels personal. “I see him doing things I used to
do. Man, they knocked me down.”
We sit down at the table, joined by Amir Jamal Touré, a
professor at Savannah State University. “That’s why I work
for myself,” Dennis replies, fixing himself a plate of Brown-
lee’s sheepshead fish and homegrown collards. “I don’t get
into politics. I just talk about culture, my heritage, and my
roots. I don’t know why people still get bothered.”84
Sharing
seeds
is a small
and simple
act, but
it’s also a
revolution.